Northridge Hockey Club Builds Winning Tradition Despite a Lack of Support

There is a highly successful sports team at Cal State Northridge, a team that makes it to the playoffs every year, that should be investigated. It is a team fraught with cash payoffs, where thousands of dollars gets into the hands of the players each year.

Even in an era of rampant cheating and scandal in the athletic programs of our colleges and universities, the NCAA might find great interest in checking this one out.

Derrick Toole, a four-year veteran of the team, spoke this week with a reporter. He was very candid.

“How about money?” he was asked.

“Oh, it comes to about $450 each player,” Toole said.

A two-year NCAA suspension of the program? A lifetime ban?

“Sometimes there’s more money involved,” Toole said. “The $450 can be just the start. After that it’s 20 bucks here and there. Whatever it takes to get us through the season.”

The NCAA’s death penalty, perhaps? Dismissal of the coach and athletic director? No out-of-state recruiting? No appearances on television for a decade?

Forget it.

Nothing is going to happen to this team.

For starters, it doesn’t belong to the NCAA. And it doesn’t recruit out of state anyway. As a matter of fact, it doesn’t recruit.

And the only chance these players have of getting on television is finding a really big one and climbing on top of it and hoping the cabinet doesn’t snap in half under the weight.

This is the CSUN hockey team. If you want to find some big-time, money-making, break-the-law-to-win collegiate sports, hang around Oklahoma, where the athletes’ parking lot looks like a scene from “The Great Gatsby.”

But if you get great pleasure in watching college athletes tape their own ankles and drive to games in beaten and battered cars, vehicles that appear to have been used as New York City street props in the latest remake of King Kong, then Matadors On Ice is the show for you.

The $450?

That’s easy to explain. That’s what it costs each player to join the team. They must get that much cash in their hands from working part-time jobs and then turn the money over to the hockey program to pay for transportation and ice time at the Pickwick Ice Arena in Burbank. It is a club sport, organized by the school’s intramural sports department. The school gives the program $1,000 a year, which covers, roughly, nothing.

But somehow, a talented hockey team makes its way past all the obstacles and onto the ice each year. Competing in the Southern California Collegiate Hockey Assn. against teams from UCLA, Cal State Fullerton, Stanford, Arizona State and Cal, the Matadors were crowned champions in the 1982-83 season.

And tonight, they will head into the SCCHA playoffs at Pickwick with the second-best record in the regular season behind UCLA and with a legitimate chance to earn another league championship.

Toole, one of three team captains, has been a CSUN skater for four years. He has played hockey since the age of 6. And he long ago grew accustomed to the fact that the average Los Angeles-area resident, and nearly all of CSUN’s 30,000 students, would much prefer to watch a really bad music video with, like, really heavy volume, than watch a hockey game.

Actually, more CSUN students claimed to have witnessed a secret, illegal football tryout held on the campus by former Coach Tom Keele several years ago than have ever watched a CSUN hockey game.

Exaggerating?

“Usually we get about 20 people at our home games,” Toole said. “But those are all parents or girlfriends. You never see a student, just a guy or girl from the school who wants to watch the game. Never.

“At a few games this year we had only three people sitting in the stands. Three of them. Two were together and one was alone.”

Toole has played hockey virtually without interruption for 15 years, starting with a program in Culver City and continuing with a league and a new team every year. It is remarkable that he has stayed with it so devotedly in this place where most residents wouldn’t know a hockey puck if it was served in their $30 plate of angel-hair pasta.

“Even my closest friends don’t care about hockey,” Toole said. “My friends going back to high school at Crespi, they never watch a hockey game. They never watched me play back then and they won’t watch me play now. I guess they don’t want to break their streak.

“At CSUN it hasn’t been any different. The vast majority of the 30,000 students don’t even know it exists. Two years ago we tried a campaign to bring more awareness to the hockey team. We were getting 15 or 20 fans a game, and we started putting up posters and flyers and drumming up all kinds of publicity. And then we were getting 25 or 30 people at every game.

“It didn’t seem to be worth the effort.”

So now, Toole and his teammates concentrate only on hockey. And just as in any sport, the playoffs are an exciting time for the participants.

“The intensity level jumps way up,” he said. “The level of play really increases. The whole league really gets up for the playoffs.”

And even though it might not be the NHL, CSUN hockey is still hockey.

“Our first game in the playoffs is Thursday night against Fullerton, and that’s the big one,” Toole said. “They’ve won the league championship four times in a row and everyone really dislikes them. When they were by far the best team in the league, they’d run up the score on you for two periods and then spend the third period fighting with you. First they’d run up the score, and then they’d beat you up.

“But they’ve fallen a lot. We beat them the last two times we played them this season. And we get another shot at them Thursday night. We’re still making up for some of the beatings they gave us. It should be a wild game.”